Friday, August 31, 2012

An
important new report, released yesterday by the American Friends
Service Committee in Arizona, is the first to focus on the effects
solitary confinement has on its survivors afterthey leave prison. Lifetime in Lockdown: How Isolation Conditions Impact Prisoner Reentry, finds
that spending time in solitary leaves people “deeply traumatized and
essentially socially disabled.” These “crippling symptoms” combine with
“the extensive legal and structural barriers to successful reentry” to
create “recipe for failure.” It is hardly surprising, then, that the
report is able to “directly link conditions in Arizona’s supermax
prisons with the state’s high recidivism rate.”

Lifetimes in Lockdown raises issues that have been largely
absent from research and discussions on prisoner reentry and recidivism.
As the report points out:

Much of the discourse…has focused on what are referred to
as ‘collateral consequences’: the structural barriers erected by
institutions that bar people with criminal convictions from voting,
housing, employment, welfare assistance, and other factors critical to
ensuring success upon release. Rarely is there discussion of the direct
impact that prison conditions have on a person’s cognitive, emotional,
social, and behavioral functioning and therefore, on that person’s
ability to function as a member of society post-incarceration.

The most serious problems, of course, result from the ”deleterious
mental health impacts of incarceration in super maximum-security—or
“supermax”—environments,” which remain with people long after they leave
solitary for the general population, or leave prison for the free
world. In addition, the report finds, “policies limiting visitation and
prohibiting maximum-security prisoners from participation in education,
treatment, and employment have a negative impact on these prisoners’
reentry prospects.”

Yet the Arizona Department of Corrections, like most prison systems,
does little to “prepare prisoners who have been held in supermax during
their incarceration for reentry to the community,” and on the outside,
“social service agencies are largely unaware of, and unprepared to
address, the special needs of this population.” Many survivors of
solitary “‘slip through the cracks,’ while others self-isolate and
deliberately avoid social service agencies.”

The report is based largely on research done by Dr. Brackette F.
Williams, Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of
Arizona, under a Soros Justice Fellowship. Under the name “Project
Homecoming,” Brackette worked with the AFSC in Arizona to study the
impact of solitary confinement on prisoner reetry. As the report notes:

Psychologist Dr. Terry Kupers makes the comparison
between prisoners who have just been released from solitary confinement
in a supermax facility and persons who were recently on suicide watch.
The most likely and dangerous time for violence, acting out, or another
crisis to occur is immediately after one is released. Dr. Kupers says,
“Whether a prisoner leaves the isolation unit and gets into trouble on
the yard or ‘maxes out…’ and gets into trouble in the community, we are
seeing a new population of prisoners who, on account of lengthy stints
in isolation units, are not well prepared to return to a social milieu.”
This is an institutional and systemic problem that is created by the
conditions of incarceration…

The participants reported that they would often avoid the areas where
the few available social service agencies, transitional homes, and
homeless shelters are located, because these are areas where they made
poor choices previously. Likewise, available shelters offer very little
in the way of privacy, are always crowded, and difficult to get into.
For prisoners who have spent years in isolation, such an environment
would be the last place they would want to turn. While deciding to avoid
problem locations would usually be considered wise, the reality is
complex–in these cases, it renders the individuals even more isolated
and lacking any support networks or services. Here, the self-inflicted
social isolation that was created by the extreme isolation in prison is
most noticeably debilitating.

In describing his life on the outside, one participant who avoided
old neighborhoods and contacts said that “life is way harder out here
for me than it is in there.” He is not alone in this nostalgia for
prison life and for the isolation of the supermax cell. A female
participant, also homeless and barely getting by at the time of the
interview, said almost ashamedly, “The worst thing that I can honestly
say about trying to get back into society is I miss my cage more and
more everyday. I just can’t function out here.” When asked, “Do you want
to the small cage back or the big cage?” she replied, “The smaller the
better. I can control everything in it.” They make repeated efforts to
avoid people, for example moving to the edge of the city or living alone
in a tunnel. It is strikingly reminiscent of the social withdrawal that
Craig Haney describes as endemic to persons held in isolation for long
periods, except now they are outside the supermax cell, in the great
wide open of supposed freedom, which terrifies them.

Thoughts of suicide permeated many of the participants’ interviews,
especially when the conversation turned toward plans for the future. At
least 10 of the male participants (50 percent) from Pima County had
considered suicide between their release from prison and their first
interview. Each participant who reported suicidal thoughts mentioned
them in more than one of their interviews. Strikingly, some of these men
had been out of prison less than one week when the first interview took
place. They reported the inability to see a viable way to remain out of
prison, yet at the same time could not imagine doing more prison time.
By their final interview, three of these men stated that they considered
suicide on a daily basis, but had yet to act on these considerations. A
few also considered committing some crime that would land them back in
prison and allow for more time to devise a better strategy for handling
life on the outside.

Anyone leaving prison is faced with an unwelcoming social landscape.
The simultaneous necessity and absence of housing and work are
experienced immediately. The freedom of release is truncated by limited
housing options, partially as a result of neighborhood bans on people
with felony convictions, and a job market that has very little
inclination or incentive to hire former prisoners. Add to this reality
significantly higher rates of mental illness; tendencies toward social
withdrawal; lack of support networks or family to rely on due to the
added social distance of a supermax prison; and no transition services
after spending years in the most extreme isolation, and the experience
of a former supermax prisoner begins to take shape. More notably it
begins to demonstrate the compounded effects of supermax confinement and
the additional limitations once released. In the same way, one
prisoner’s perceived ease of life in prison compared to his experiences
of life on the outside, as well as another’s longing for a space she can
control even if it is a cage, demonstrates precisely the extra layer of
difficulties created by prolonged isolation.

A press release from AFSC calls the report’s findings ”a wake-up call
to corrections officials, state leaders, and social service agencies,
who are often completely unaware of the prison experiences of their
clients or how to assist them in this transition. AFSC hopes that this
research will add to the growing body of evidence that the practice of
long-term solitary confinement in supermax units creates more problems
than it is purported to solve and should be abolished.”

AFSC also notes that “the release of this report coincides with the launch of Arizona is Maxed Out,
a joint campaign with the ACLU of Arizona against the planned expansion
of maximum-security prisons in Arizona. The latest state budget
allocated $50 million to build 500 more maximum-security beds in the
next two years.”

Break the Chains.info

is a news and discussion forum for supporters of political prisoners, prisoners of war, politicized social prisoners, and victims of police and state intimidation.

This blog is organized and updated autonomously of the disbanded Break the Chains Prisoner Support Network formerly based in Eugene, Oregon. While this online project shares several of the same concerns as the old Break the Chains collective, no formal organization exists behind the current web presence.

"I will never surrender my pride and dignity nor allow the system to 'cut my tongue' and I will always, without fear, speak out against these war crimes and crimes against humanity, no matter if I spend the rest of my life in a prison cage, and draw my last breath of air laying down in this steel bed surrounded by razor-wire fences and cages, and its prison policies that are designed to destroy one's humanity…."